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Popular Culture in Critical Literacy
What is Popular Culture? Popular culture is everywhere in our daily lives, it is the ideas, perspectives, attitudes and images that are within a mainstream of a given culture. Popular culture plays an influential role in children’s everyday lives and experiences that is exposed through film, news media, cartoon programs, music, advertising and technology. Popular culture allows children to have a sense of belonging. It is important as a parent to understand and build on your children’s literacy development by understanding your child’s interests through popular culture. Why is popular culture an important issue in critical literacy? Popular culture plays an important role in children’s literacy experiences. Children’s popular culture needs to be recognised to ensure that children’s experiences are meaningful. Popular culture can be used to be able to connect children to a more higher level of texts and allow them to develop critical literacy skills. Parents need to further extend on their child’s popular culture interests at home so that their literacy learning will be motivated. Popular culture develops children’s understanding of such things as good versus evil, heros, gender, race and social power in society. Popular culture enables children to provide a means that they are familiar with and question challenging texts. Critical literacy experiences involve electronic, digital and popular texts that reflect children’s pathways to literacy. A pathway may include the child’s experiences with technology through watching television, reading the television guide or operating the remote control. What can I do? Children are growing up in the digital world and it is your job as a parent to support your child's interest. Engagement with media is generally active, not passive and promotes play, speaking, listening and reading. Children learn a lot from film and television and it has a positive impact on many aspects of their lives. As a parents you can support children’s interest with popular culture, media and new technologies by interacting with your child and asking them questions to enhance their critical literacy abilities. Questions that could be asked include: *Using your child's interest with popular culture, ask them questions about particular characters and why they are portrayed in that way? *Question why characters are dressed the way they are? *Question why characters are given particular strengths, abilities and power? This will allow children to develop a more critical view of popular culture, and understand that there are different point of views in film, media, popular culture and television. For more strategies on how to develop children's critical abilities, check out Strategies for Parents At our centre... At our centre, we incorporate popular culture and critical literacy by: *Dramatic play corner - adding costumes of children's preferences e.g superman costume and asking the children questions to challenge their critical thinking. *Book corner - setting out books that children have an interest in, educators will question gender identity etc. *Arts and craft - using logos to critically compare the difference e.g. why is the edge of the barbie logo curved whereas the batman logo is sharp. *Computer/digital media area - critically analyse games e.g. the barbie website. *Construction/block corner - adding dolls, books, cars *Outdoor area - dress up (batman, spiderman, frozen, fairies) *Home corner - books, dolls, menus *Once a week, our class meets to discuss any issues they may have regarding gender, culture and popular culture ideals they have seen over the week For information on how to help our centre incorporate critical literacy, check out How to help Some interesting sites These sites can provide some more information regarding critical literacy: *Barbie - You can explore this website with your child and get critical by asking questions. *Power Rangers- You can explore this website with your child and get critical by asking questions. *Pokemon- You can explore this website with your child and get critical by asking questions. *Dora the Explorer- You can explore this website with your child and get critical by asking questions. *Further explanation of popular culture For more resources on critical literacy, check out Additional Resources Category:Popular culture Category:Children Category:Early childhood Category:Education Category:Teaching Category:Teachers Category:Educators